


Little Red

by femharel



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Abstract, Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 16:20:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femharel/pseuds/femharel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time there was a dear little girl, who lived in the depths of the woods. She was loved by all, but by none more so than her grandmother, who had given the girl a cloak made of red velvet that suited her so well that she never wore anything else. So it was that the girl was happy; and so it was that the girl was never alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Red

**I**

Once upon a time there was a dear little girl, who lived in the depths of the woods. She was loved by all, but by none more so than her grandmother, who had given the girl a cloak made of red velvet that suited her so well that she never wore anything else. So it was that the girl was happy; and so it was that the girl was never alone.

One day, however, when she donned that red cloak, the girl packed a few of her belongings, said goodbye to her grandmother (and all who had loved her), and left for the world outside. She made it past the village, past the river, to the mountains—but she made it only a day before the dreaded wolf found her. He approached her first, sweetly. He approached her, soft, never once bearing his over-white teeth.

“Where are you going, little girl?” the wolf asked her kindly.

“I do not know,” she explained—for the girl did not know where she was going, only that she had to, had needed to, that she was searching for something much more.

“What have you got in your basket?” the wolf asked.

"Food, for travel. Blankets, and potions, and books.” 

"For?”

“I am going to get out of the woods.”

Now, the wolf thought to himself, ‘No mortal has ever come out of the woods’, alive, at least—and while he had planned on eating her, the wolf became curious as to the girl’s intentions. He wondered at when she might break (inevitably), as she moved farther and farther from home. Predictably, it was too much a temptation for the wolf to relinquish. Typically, the wolf was inclined to wait for the time she might bleed. It was then that he marked his deception.

“If you would not mind,” the wolf said, rustling, breathing, “I should wish to accompany you. I could keep you safe in the darkness. Our nights are known for their monsters. I could protect you from things that might otherwise do you harm, as I have lived here for some time, and I know more of injury than a girl in a red velvet cloak.”

The girl agreed to let him follow her, and the wolf was pleased. She knew she should have feared him, but the girl was not afraid. She saw no reason not to travel in his company. If the girl were to leave home for the wilds of the forest, it could not hurt to carry the heart of a wolf.  

 

  **II**

The wolf was tall, broad, brooding. From his shoulders to his back, the girl could rest her whole body on top of him, entombed by his body and fur, she imagined—for she could not get near enough to bring it from theory. The wolf pulled away from the touch of the little girl’s hand. The wolf withdrew to the shadows when she neared him: comfortably, contented to shift and churn in the shade of the wild, wet trees. Still, he could not prevent her from watching. 

The wolf was black like wet iron or lava rock. His spine was sutured like the crags of an evergreen cliff, whipped thick like liquorice-coloured snow. The most unnerving, however, were the wolf’s marbled eyes, which were as red as the girl’s velvet cloak. His eyes were red like a rabbit was red when you sliced down its belly; they were red like a fisherman’s storm. Worst of all, the wolf’s eyes gleamed brighter than maw of his gums when he turned his face towards sunlight. In the moonlight, they glinted like the slip of an easy-used knife. 

Sometimes, the girl noticed, the wolf would be watching her, too. Sometimes, the wolf inspected the girl when he thought she was asleep, tending to her bedside, (closer, closer) lowering his snout to breathe at her small, warm hands. 

**III**

Yet every morning, the girl awoke, and she walked farther on through the forest. The wolf was not long behind her. He did not leave. Where she left him water, he brought her small game—and at night, they sat by the fire, where the wolf did not speak (at first), until one evening, the girl said to him, “You know, you really have really big ears.”

The wolf laughed. “All the better to listen to you, my dear.”

“And?”

“I listen to stories in the woods. You would not understand them.”

“I would. Please, share,” she continued. “Tell me what you know of the forest.”

The wolf seemed surprised that she would ask him such questions.

“Do you not know the forest yourself?” the wolf snapped. “You have lived here all of your life.”   
  
“I have,” the girl said, “but I do not know enough, and I would like to learn more. I want to know… everything _._ ”

“That is…” If the wolf was taken aback, he did not show more. He had wanted to eat her: to cut the girl’s wrists from her arms, and her fingers from her hands—yet above them, there were more stars than bones in the body; there were more to lost tales than ink on a page. Finally, the wolf said, “What more had you wanted to know?”

**IV**

The wolf told the girl stories, then, slowly (at first), of the moons he had seen, and the leaves of the trees, and how everything, altogether, was breathing.

The wolf was still hungry,  _so hungry_ —but something had changed _._ There was pain in breast, and guilt in his fangs, and her voice made him think of the things he had eaten. Her smell made him think of the things he filled himself with in place of companionship—meats—and the friends he had lost to the maw of the woods. In its place, her words were like embers, fragile, blazing, alive.

The girl had surprised him. She had survived the dangers of the forest, and she wanted to learn—more than learn but  _discover_ , consume, in a way he had long since passed. The wolf had not eaten her. He would not eat her, perhaps. No, he could not eat her, for the wolf was cautiously dreaming. At night, the wolf could almost remember the time when he had once been a man.

**V**

On the fifth morning, the girl said, “My, what big eyes you have.”

“Oh?” The wolf smiled, his teeth rattling, glistened. They were halfway through the woods now, and the dreaded black wolf had grown more and more used to the little girl’s mumblings. “You would speak of my eyes now, would you?”

“I would,” she laughed.

The wolf replied, “All the better to see things with, da’len.”

"And what do you see?" she asked. 

 _Mirrors, skyline, grass that was leaking like water. Terrors, bloodlust, storm clouds, sleet. An empty room and a fountain of sand._ But even so, now, the wolf saw a dear girl in a velvet red cloak, and she was—

“Everything,” the wolf repeated. 

**VI**

But the wolf was not a man, and the wolf was (ever) still hungry.  _The wolf,_ he thought, _would always, always be hungry._

**VII**

It was on the seventh night that he told her: not all of it, but enough of before. The forest was bruised and it was ruined, the wolf admit. In the trees, there used to be clouds. Higher than that, there used to be castles with spires made of glass and of fire—older substances for which he no longer had a name, but he remembered them. The land was like a singing inside of him: it was old, deep, hot, hollowed, so caringly drenched in primordial light. And, sometimes, he said, there was burning, but he did not tell the girl when it had finally stopped.

He was glad she was a mortal who was leaving the woods. He was glad she had decided to leave them. She, who was questioning and intelligent and bright—the girl draped in the red velvet cloak. She (at least) could escape this forest’s brutalities.  
  
“You have to,” he said, when the wolf could not do so himself.

While they slept, the girl considered what her friend had revealed, and decided what did and did not matter. She told him, “It must have been beautiful”—and the wolf thought that  _she_ was beautiful, as he pulled the red cloak higher atop of her, that he might not witness her throat.

**VIII**

“My, my, what big hands you have,” the dreaded wolf said, the eighth day, when the girl stumbled at the river for drinking water. Clumsily, she had spilled the bucket and made green in the mud, fostering clay at the breadth of her footfalls. 

“You use them well,” he teased. “I am beginning to believe you would not have survived this far in the forest without me.” 

“Like you would know,” she said. “You don’t have hands at all. How would you know what they’re good for?” Which was true, a fact: a wolf did not have hands. If he did, he could only consider their functions, the possibilities, the skin. 

"All the better to hold you with, I suppose."

The girl paused. The waters were shining, and her feet submerged between the cool, slick earth. She had left her cloak on the rock-face, so there was nothing but shoulders below her bare neck, which were dappled and steepled with sun. The wolf watched her, as he had before, but this time, the pair were both awake. This time, his eyes did not let her go.

For what other reasons would hands then be good for, he wondered, when a wolf could be turned into a man? 

**IX**

When he came to her that night, the wolf did not tell stories. He did not dream and he did not speak of the powers of the woods. He walked, sole to sole, quietly, wilfully, and slipped the dear girl from her red velvet cloak. The wolf was still hungry, but the wolf was a man, now, breathing, and had longings far softer than flesh. She awoke, studied him: said, “You’re—”

“Shh.” He silenced her: a finger at the bottom lip, committedly placed. The girl’s mouth was wet was previous slumbering, and he brushed a warm thumb from her lips to her chin, before holding her face in his hands.

Outside of the woods, he imagined that each pair of lovers had their own constellations: and in theirs there would be three stars, touching as they were now, two hands to two cheeks, eyes meshed to (not-red) eyes, two bodies pulling like a ship through twilight.

She lay a hand on his mortal breast bone, a second collision, nails a flutter, drawing an ‘x’ on his steady, white chest. 

"Is that you?" the girl asked. 

“My,” the dreaded wolf whispered, “what a big mouth you have.”

"Such a big mouth."

"All the better to kiss you with," he offered. 

“And what big teeth…” the girl replied. But they were not teeth as they were before, she knew. Transposed of his suit of matted black fur, the wolf was only a man. And while the grandmother had loved her dear little girl, she did not love her as a man did: which was greater than the wolf had, too, his heart comparable to the kindling of a smoke fire. For the man, body shivering, as he lowered his mouth to the dear little girl’s, he kissed a woman, instead: speaking names of devotion that the wolf had forgotten in the dark. 

"Ar lath ma, vhenan." 

**X**

So it was, that the dear little girl with the red velvet cloak had strayed too far from her homeland. She had found a wolf in the jaws of the forest, and carried his heart away from the wilderness—yet, in the morning, when the woman awoke, the man was nowhere to be found. She had reached the edge of the forest, which was open, and startled, and clawing with brassy pink sky. She had entered the limits of the outside world, where the wolf was not, could not, and should not be. 

Because the wolf, unlike the man, could never be happy; and so it was that the wolf would always (forever—and away from her), eternally, and brokenly, be alone. 


End file.
